Influencer Marketing Glossary

A creator with roughly 10,000–100,000 followers on the platform you are buying — a budget category, not a law. Some 2025 reports cut the band at 50K.

A creator with about 1,000–10,000 followers. Highest typical engagement, lowest reach per person, often still willing to post for product — or a small fee.

A creator with about 100,000–1,000,000 followers. You are buying reach and a production machine, not peer trust. Price and engagement both move the wrong way versus micro.

How much of an audience talks back. Say your formula out loud: (likes + comments [+ saves/shares]) ÷ followers × 100 — or ÷ views on TikTok. Those are different numbers.

Cost per 1,000 impressions: (total cost ÷ impressions) × 1,000. The cleanest way to compare a $700 Reel to a $12 paid-social ad — on reach only.

Total cost ÷ (likes + comments + saves + shares + clicks you actually count). The metric that matches why you hired a micro.

Two different products share the letters: unpaid customer content, and paid creator footage made to run as your ads — often never posted on their grid.

You run the creator’s post as a paid ad — often through their handle — so the ad keeps their face, social proof, and comments. Meta calls this Partnership Ads; TikTok calls it Spark Ads. “Whitelisting” is the old agency word.

One page (two if you must): who you talk to, the numbers, three proofs, and a rate card. Not a 14-slide brand theme.

A menu of fees by deliverable — Reel, Stories, TikTok, YouTube integration, usage, Spark / Partnership Ads — not one blob called “sponsorship.”

Any post with a material connection — cash, free product, a trip, a commission — must be disclosed so an ordinary person cannot miss it. Instagram’s Paid Partnership tag is not enough by itself.

They get a cut of sales through a unique link or code, instead of — or on top of — a flat fee. Beauty made this the default; everyone else is copying it.

A retainer over months, not a one-off post: fewer dollars per piece, more pieces, a creator who already knows the product when you launch the next SKU.

You send product to many people with no contract and no guaranteed post, and hope a fraction publish. A volume bet, mostly at nano, never your only channel.

A creator between micro and macro — often ~50,000–500,000 followers depending on who is defining it — used when brands want more reach than a micro without celebrity pricing.

TikTok’s product for running paid ads from a creator’s organic post so the ad keeps their handle, caption, and social proof — TikTok’s cousin to Meta Partnership Ads.

A dollar estimate of what a creator’s earned impressions, likes, comments, and shares would have cost as paid media — a scale number, not a sales number. Use it for context, never as the metric that decides renewal.

Revenue attributed to a campaign ÷ what you spent on it. The metric that should decide which creators get rehired — unlike EMV, it is tied to money that actually moved.

The license that lets a brand use a creator’s content anywhere beyond their own organic post — a separate line item from the content fee, scoped by platform, duration, and whether the use is organic or paid.

A contract term stopping a creator from posting for named competitors for a set window — typically 30–60 days after the last deliverable, not an open-ended ban on their whole category.

Purchased, bot, or otherwise inauthentic followers inflating a creator’s count. A 2026 audit of 100,000 accounts found roughly a third showed fraud signals — worse on Instagram than TikTok, and worst in the macro tier and the beauty niche.

TikTok’s built-in storefront and affiliate program: creators tag products in videos and LIVEs and earn a seller-set commission automatically, on top of or instead of a content fee.

Amazon’s creator storefront program: approved creators get a vanity URL (amazon.com/shop/handle) and post shoppable video and photos, earning the same 1–20% category commission as Amazon Associates — plus optional flat-fee brand deals through Creator Connections.

The broader industry of people earning income by making content directly for an audience. Influencer brand deals are one revenue stream inside it, alongside subscriptions, ad revenue share, digital products, and platform payouts.

A pre-agreed percentage of the total fee a brand still owes if a campaign is cancelled after work has started — scaled to how far the work had progressed when the brand pulled out.

The cut a manager or talent agency takes from a creator's brand-deal income for representing them and negotiating on their behalf — commonly 15–20% for a personal manager, 10–20% for an agency, and the two can stack if a creator has both.

A platform-run directory and deal tool — TikTok Creator Marketplace, Instagram's equivalent, YouTube BrandConnect, and similar — where brands search creators by niche and stats and handle contracts and payment in one place, for a take rate built into the deal.